By Mel Luymes

If you made it to the International Plowing Match (IPM) in Niagara back in September, I hope you made it to the Community Hall in the northeast corner at the West Niagara Agricultural Centre Fairgrounds. It was filled with quilts from local guilds, but there was one you shouldn’t have missed.

The Quilt of Belonging is a ten-foot tall and 120-foot long collaborative textile art piece. It would have taken your breath away and could have kept you there the rest of the day. 

It was gorgeous inside the hall – a spectrum of colours and 263 11-inch blocks – spanning the wall and turning two corners, cordoned off with a low rope to stop greasy fingers from touching it. The Quilt of Belonging is the legacy of Esther Bryan (1952-2022) and includes blocks created by immigrants from every country in the world along with 70 First Nations within Canada and the medicine wheel to represent all those not on the quilt. 

It was a monumental project that took six years (1998-2004) and 46,000 volunteer hours to complete, from research and 215,000 km of travel, to reaching out to consulates and working with the 261 immigrant and First Nations people, to hand-embroidering the countries’ names beside each block and putting it all together. Esther Bryan was from Williamstown, a small town near Cornwall, and the town donated a small community centre for the volunteers to use over the course of the project. 

The Quilt of Belonging began touring in 2005 and one of the first places it went was up north to a remote First Nations community. It was a promise that Esther made to that group; it was critical to her to involve the First Nations in Canada. Their blocks line the entire bottom row of the Quilt, as its foundation. Typically stored rolled onto cylinders in wheeled crates, the Quilt had to be removed from its crates to get it on a bush plane and snowmobile to the First Nation community.

Coming by truck from St. Jacobs, it was easier to get it to this year’s IPM. Niagara local, Brenda Vaughan, was the local sponsor and liaison, bringing dozens of local volunteers from the Grimsby Quilt Guild, Smithville Quilt Guild and Dunnville’s Own Tiny Stitchers (D.O.T.S.) to help set up and take down the piece. They also watched out for it during its week at the IPM. Brenda says she loved having it there and spending so much time with it. She was grateful that Senator Rob Black came to see it but was a bit ticked off that Premier Doug Ford did not drop by. “It’s his loss,” she says.

“I love being there as people see it,” says Jax Rula, “because I get to hear their own stories come out, about where they came from and how they got to Canada.”

Jax and her sister, Adrienne Carter, are now on the Board for the Quilt and are helping to get it touring once again. Together, they run TriSisters Art House in St. Jacobs, where they converted an old tire garage into a bright space for local artists to both work and sell. 

“I first saw the Quilt of Belonging in 2009 at the Creativity Festival in Toronto” says Jax, “and I paid admission for the rest of the week just to come back and look at it.”  

Adrienne was first introduced to the Quilt when it was new and exhibited it at the Glenbow Museum in 2007 for three months. She got to know Esther Bryan then and worked with her once again to bring the Quilt to Hamilton for Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation. 

Sadly, Esther passed away in 2022 after a brief battle with cancer. Between her passing and the pandemic, the Quilt hadn’t moved much for a few years. The Quilt of Belonging is also a registered charity, with a board of directors responsible for it. The board was working on a sustainable plan for the Quilt when Jax and Adrienne approached them to exhibit the Quilt at their annual fibre arts festival, WEFT Fest, in May 2025 in St. Jacobs.  The sisters made a proposal to the board that the Quilt come to live at the TriSisters Art House, and they work on travelling it again across Canada and internationally. They want as many Canadians to see it – and be impacted by it – as possible. 

“It’s a love poem to Canadians, through the fibre arts,” says Jax. “In an age of diversity and division, this quilt speaks about connectedness and belonging, and it demonstrates that we’re stronger when we work together and honour the diverse nations in Canada.”

The quilt was, and continues to be, a group effort. The set-up and take-down takes several people. I was grateful for the opportunity to put my height to good use, don some white gloves for a morning and help put the piece in storage, with a lively group of local volunteers. We got a close-up view of each section and had the opportunity to see the back of the piece, which has the inscription of the sponsor of each of the 263 blocks: various clubs, associations, families, and individuals. 

Every block was beautiful and unique. Made with various textiles and using symbols from each artists’ country of origin, the Quilt was arranged by colour, moving through the spectrum, from red at the edges and meeting at red again in the middle, where a wispy red maple leaf made of beads was positioned at the top row. The leaf looks incomplete.

“It symbolizes that we’re not done yet, building Canada,” says another volunteer, as a dozen of us delicately hold a large piece, oohing and awing at it, commenting on various blocks and hearing stories about them. 

Central African Republic’s block, created by Rosalie Bernier, uses butterfly wings, the Libya block was made using pieces of the artist’s daughter’s wedding dress, while the Sudan block includes the shirt the artist wore on his journey to Canada. 

Each block represents one person’s story coming to Canada and each designer’s story is captured in a large full-colour book that accompanies the Quilt. There is also a 47-minute documentary available online, including interviews with Esther herself.

Esther grew up in a missionary family and moved around to several places around the world with her family, but it was when she finally connected with her father’s Slovak roots before he passed away, that she felt a calling to do this Quilt. She didn’t know how many countries were in the world at the time but suspected it would be a mammoth project. 

And it was. It started with attempts to contact immigrants across Canada, working with the United Nations, associations and clubs – any way they could – even calling for people from specific countries over radio broadcasts. From a small town in eastern Ontario, many of the volunteers got to connect with people from countries they had never even heard of. 

The documentary also includes interviews with several of the block designers, some in their own languages. 

“I often feel like a cut-off flower, and I’m put in a very beautiful vase, and that vase is Canada because its fantastic. But my roots are still in Sweden,” says Britt Lepa. Tatiana Jouikova, Russia’s block maker, also shares her journey to Canada for the sake of her daughter, and that she can’t hear the Canadian anthem without tears in her eyes.

“The real quilt that is being woven here is the human quilt, it’s the relationship, it’s the invisible tapestry of humanity,” says Esther. 

“It was our dream that this would show or tell people that there is still a possibility in the world,” she continues, noting that it can be difficult being bombarded with stories of war and greed. “But the way to change it is not waiting for a politician or a decree that the world is going to be different. The way that happens is from the bottom up.  It happens with ordinary people, like you and I, piece by piece. How I treat my neighbour … that’s what’s going to change the world.”

It was truly breathtaking and made me appreciate my (Dutch) grandparents for choosing Canada as their new home. If you missed your opportunity to see the Quilt of Belonging at the IPM, you can stay tuned to quiltofbelonging.ca to find out where it may be heading next.  ◊